Thanks to our connected world, people who either love or hate a product, don’t have to keep their opinions to themselves. There is no shortage of platforms to express their thoughts.
This steady stream of opining is actually a source of fuel for Birdie, a company that uses AI to comb through product reviews and discussion forums (written in English) to surface product insights for CPGs and other other product brands.
For instance, by applying its AI to customer reviews of V8 juice, Birdie was able to show that people were often using the vegetable drink as a hangover remedy. By uncovering this data, V8 could then choose to create a specific line of drinks or marketing campaign that reaches this particular type of indulgent adult. The same idea applies to those pouches of pureed foods for toddlers. Birdie discovered that athletes and outdoors people carried these with them because they were easy to carry and loaded with nutrition.
Birdie is not a social media listening tool. It’s not just tallying up social mentions of a brand and analyzing timelines to see what is trending. Instead, the company is more focused on consumer product reviews on Amazon, Google and other places where purchases can be verified and are filled with more details about how the product arrived, how it was used, how long it lasted, etc.
“Our main differentiator is the fact that we chose to be very focused on products, and built a deep dictionary that relates to the buying journey of consumer products,” Patrícia Osório, CMO of Birdie told me by phone this week. “We capture the data related to a product attribute, or usage of the product, how they bought the product. With that, we can show our clients a detailed and easy to find view about how consumers are interacting with their brand.”
According to Osório, the number of product reviews in the U.S. has been growing quickly, with an increase of 60 percent year over year. She said there is an average of 621 new reviews written per day on food products, with an average of 342 reviews per SKU.
In a way, Birdie is like a distant cousin to Spoonshot, which applies its AI to vast datasets on food to uncover novel flavor combinations. Only in Birdie’s case it is uncovering novel uses for existing products.
Founded two and a half years ago, Birdie has raised $1.6 million in Seed funding and counts Procter & Gamble among its clients.
Birdie’s technology actually fits in with the larger hacker culture that we live in today. In addition to expressing their opinions, people love deconstructing and re-purposing existing products to fit their own needs, and sharing their findings with other people online. All this adds up to a never-ending source of data for Birdie’s algorithms, and more product insights for brands.
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